


Empire of the Sun (the The Sun Also Sets remix)

by iberiandoctor (Jehane)



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman, X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Angst, Coma, Consent, Crossover, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, M/M, Major Illness, Memory, Old Age, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-04 02:42:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20463704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: ”Seeing you is like waking from a twenty-year-old coma... As if we had been both living our lives on the same artificial respirator, waiting for that time when we would finally meet and scale our way back to the Piavet memorial.”- Call Me By Your Name - André Aciman; Part Four:Ghost Spots.





	Empire of the Sun (the The Sun Also Sets remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Sun Also Rises](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16048793) by [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/pseuds/asuralucier). 
  * Inspired by [Empire (State of Mind)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17109956) by [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/pseuds/asuralucier). 

> CW for major illness and memory issues as in the original story.

A memory sits next to him in a horseshoe-shaped booth in the bar of an old New England hotel. Older, still lithe, wrists still bird-thin under narrow shirt cuffs. The curly hair is shorter, neater. Skin’s as sun-warmed smooth as the day they met. 

Oliver remembers that summer like it was yesterday. Remembers, even though he’s forgotten so many of the others that came after.

It was autumn when they met again, decades afterwards. They had found a quiet spot overlooking the Hudson, and a large flower garden that was in full bloom. 

Oliver remembers he ordered a martini. Sapphire gin. He orders it now. 

They sit uncomfortably close but do not touch. They had not touched on the night in question.

The waiter says, “Can I get you anything else, gentlemen?”

“That’ll be all for now,” Elio says. “Thank you.”

“What am I eating?” Oliver doesn’t remember. But this is not alarming. The real estate in his head has been crumbling for a good while now — the same way as the 19th century brownstone where he and Rebecca and their boys used to live has been falling slowly into ruin. 

“You ordered the tortelli cremaschi.” Elio smiles. It’s not the same smile he gave the waiter. “It’s a devil to make, which is probably why it’s your favourite.”

Well. If Oliver’s memories have supplanted whatever they’d eaten that autumn night with Mafalda’s traditional summer Lombardy dish, who is he to gainsay them?

The tortelli is as good as Oliver remembers. The balance of flavors — the sweetness of the amaretti and the spice of the candied fruit — is intriguing to his tongue, the dough half-moons deceptively light and airy. He’s never eaten anything as perfectly tempting since Crema. Now, thanks to the current circumstances, he gets to do so again. 

“Why are we here?” Oliver asks, after a while.

Elio says, “Can’t you remember? We came here because I wasn’t ready to have dinner at your house, to meet your wife and your sons and your pets. Your study, books, world, life. Safer to have a drink at my hotel instead.” 

Oliver does remember: Elio coming to his lecture, wearing a navy blue blazer that made him look like a lawyer or a banker, even though Oliver knows that’s not the path he ended up taking. That beloved face, filled with years and time, appearing suddenly as if from a parallel life. Waking Oliver from a twenty-year coma, from the placid, autumnal existence of family and children, bringing with him their invincible Italian summer.

In that moment, Oliver was twenty-four again, and standing on the platform of a forgotten train station, where he embraced a young man and failed to recognize the happiness that had been meant for them. 

“It wasn’t safer, though.”

“Maybe. It was a good hotel.” Elio shrugs the well-cut shoulders of his jacket. “After that night, I made sure to stay there every time I passed through.”

Oliver looks down at his tortelli, and then back at Elio. He can’t remember the word for how he feels. “Every time? Were you alone?”

“Is that curiosity or jealousy?”

Ah, there it is. “Can’t it be both?”

“Do you remember the story from the book my mother was reading that summer? The knight from Toledo who asked his lover if he should speak or die?” Elio stares into the distance. His eyes are very blue, very sharp. There’s an edge to his smirk as he knocks back the Bombay Sapphire. “He fudged, and by the time he spoke, it was too late. His lover wouldn’t have him. He met his end in battle against the King of Grenada, but he really died a long time before he finally fell on his sword.”

“I did speak,” Oliver reminds him, after a while. “And you knew. Although we didn’t end up together, you knew. Don’t ever say you didn’t.”

Elio doesn’t say anything.

“Anyway. This...you know, it wasn’t quite what I had in mind,” Oliver mutters.

Elio says, archly, “Would you rather be doing something else?”

“Yes," Oliver says, because it’s the truth, but then he has to catch himself and try to think. Is that too forward of him, given what's happened between them before this point in time, and since?

“You took my heart,” Elio remarks. “You showed me the life I was meant to have, and then you left. I wouldn’t worry too much about being _forward_.”

Oliver has never been good at arguing with Elio — and he clearly can’t argue with an Elio who’s become a mind-reader — so he doesn’t try.

*

Afterwards, they take a walk by the river. Oliver tries not to notice how the evening is getting brighter around them, the genteel greenery giving way to tiny, stunted palm trees and gnarled olive shrubs that have surely never grown in New England. But when they arrive at the knoll shaded by tall pines that overlook a quiet, sheltered cove, he sees they have traveled in time as well as space, to the place he only visits in his dreams.

The knoll. The embankment. Elio’s word for it was _berm_.

Elio tilts his head. His hair is longer, the way he wore it then. His curls tangle in front of his eyes; Oliver’s palms prickle with the need to brush them away. Not yet. He’s trying to be good — the way he remembers trying that first time, all those years ago.

They toe off their shoes and socks and wade into the shockingly cold water. Elio reminds him that it’s fed by the spring from the Alpi Orobi. They’re still dressed from the hotel restaurant. Before they go in any further, Elio takes his jacket off and Oliver follows suit. In the slanting summer sunlight, Oliver gets his first real look at Elio’s cream-colored shirt, how the starched material stretches around his now-boyish chest. There’s no sign of civilization around them anywhere; no real reason to not follow the jackets with —

“…Do you want to get naked with me?” Elio says, with a sideways glance that Oliver remembers. “You weren’t up for it the last time we were here. But I’m feeling like you might enjoy it now.”

“I might, might I?” OIiver smiles reluctantly. Elio’s face might be seventeen again, but his eyes are as old as Rome itself. “Who even says things like that any more?”

“You can’t blame me for asking,” Elio points out. “Informed consent, it was a thing even then. And now… _especially_ now…” Elio's eyes are serious and steady, trying to convey the importance of what he’s asking of Oliver. But Oliver can’t hold his gaze, or focus on what Elio’s saying. His eyes are drawn instead to the narrow line of throat as Elio starts to unbutton his shirt.

“Now I think you need _especial_ help with your cufflinks.”

“There you go, fudging again,” Elio says, but he raises his shirt cuffs and lets Oliver step in close.

“You weren’t always this reluctant to accept my help.” Standing with barely a hair’s breadth of space between them, it’s easy for Oliver to lean down and press his mouth to Elio’s Adam’s apple the way he’s been thinking about. His body remembers what it’s supposed to be doing, even though his mind may have let some details slip, and he uses the slightest scrape of teeth.

“Ah, so you do remember,” Elio says with a seventeen-year-old’s breathy hiccup of pleasure.

“You know it,” Oliver says, even though it sounds like wishful thinking, even to him.

Elio chuckles knowingly, as if he’s fooling no one, and reaches up to kiss him. Oliver only realizes he’s been expecting a tentative, conciliatory, I’ll-meet-you-halfway-but-no-further kiss when Elio’s zeal almost tackles him to the grass. It’s like the very first time: savage and famished, the kind of passion that might well have built Rome in a day, that takes no prisoners except for this one. 

The moment is dizzying, electric, overwhelming: the sun, the lake, the press of Elio’s insistent young body against Oliver’s own. The smell of Elio, from his neck and armpits, the remembered taste — what is it?

Peaches. Elio tastes like the golden peaches from Annella’s garden, and something else. 

Finally subsiding, Elio murmurs, against Oliver’s swollen lips, “I see you remember this part.”

Oliver finds himself caught off guard by Elio’s ending of their kiss. He needs to take a moment. Did he tell Elio, a lifetime ago, _You’ll kill me if you stop_? Or was it Elio who said it?

“It was me,” Elio confesses. “But only because you’d said it to me first, in my dream of you.” 

Oliver thought he remembered everything about their time together, but he’s clearly forgotten this. “Did you dream about me, before?”

Elio smooths his hands along Oliver’s jawline and presses them against Oliver’s forehead, as if he can read Oliver’s thoughts and memories through his fingertips. As if he so desperately wants something from Oliver that Oliver has never been able to give him, or, more accurately, has never been able to give to him _again_.

“Before,” Elio says. “And after. And now.”

*

Oliver’s become old-fashioned in his old age. When they finally get naked with each other, he finds he prefers that there be a bed involved. And what better place than the place where they were last together? 

“When we were together — is that how you think of it?”

Oliver feels himself flush. But indeed this is how he thinks of it, that damp _ferragosto_ evening in the Piazza Navona, with French windows that overlooked the glistening domes of churches in the vista below, where the bathroom and bedroom had seen them surrender their last secrets and last shame.

“How prim you’ve become,” Elio says, teasingly. They lean naked out of the windows above the magnificent cityscape as they did that unbearably hot late-late Roman afternoon, watching the sun set. “You used to like being seen.” His hand curves around Oliver’s buttocks, rubbing slowly, and then he slides the tip of his middle finger inside. 

Oliver’s knees almost buckle with the sudden stab of pleasure. “Lean forward,” Elio murmurs into Oliver’s ear, and Oliver can do nothing but comply; Elio snickers in satisfaction as Oliver’s cock rouses to take in the balmy air. 

“Just think. You could have always had this,” Elio adds, unnecessarily, while Oliver fights for composure.

“Do you know how often I’ve thought that?”

Elio presses his mouth to the skin at the base of Oliver’s skull. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I wasn’t trying to be cruel. I do know.”

Oliver feels his thighs spreading of their own volition, his body opening up by slow, inexorable increments until Elio’s finger is entirely inside him. _My body is your body._ To say nothing of his heart. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

“Well,” Elio says. “I think that, given the circumstances, I know enough.”

When they make love, they revisit San Clemente, the site of the home of Roman consul Flavius Clemens, where persecuted Christians took refuge in the time of Nero. It was built beside an underground pagan temple dedicated to Mithras, God of the Morning Sun, Light of the World. Over Mithras’ temple another church was built, to another Clement: Pope St. Clement. The building and excavation have gone on and on — like subconscious, like memory, like life itself. There’s nothing new under the sun, like every ruler throughout time who builds his empire upon the ruins of past civilizations, like every lover who builds his kingdom on the foundation of past loves. 

In this way they come together, trailing avatars of bedfellows past. Oliver brings Rebecca, and fair Margaret before her, and before _her_, the even fairer Jordan. He doesn’t know who Elio brings; he finds he doesn’t want to know. Is this shiver, or this sensitivity, something from their time in Rome, or is it something new? The bare curl of Elio’s foot, the characteristic tilt of his head, the arch of Elio’s body above his own like the unbroken curve of a bow? 

What he knows is this: if he could have Elio in his dreams every night for the rest of his life, he would gladly stake his life’s estate on dreams and be done with the rest.

Elio’s muscles clench around him; it’s his turn to open for Oliver, slowly and sweetly, every part of him strange and familiar at once. “Don’t stop,” he mutters. “Whatever you do, don’t stop.”

Oliver rolls his hips and Elio thrusts back. They’re both dripping in sweat. Pleasure crackles in each fibre and sinew of Oliver’s body; every synapse in his mind’s alive again. He thinks to himself: _What is life, without this_? And there is the answer, so immediate it must be truth: _No life at all_.

“I won’t. I don’t want to kill you, remember?”

Elio grasps his thighs to drive him deeper, digs bruises into Oliver’s skin. “I do remember,” he groans. “I remember everything.”

Oliver wishes that were still true for him; wishes he was more than who he is. In lieu of memory, in lieu of _more_, he curls his hand around Elio’s prick until Elio spills himself harshly and gasps out his own name. 

*

Later, they subside in each other’s arms. Oliver watches as the peeling wallpaper dissolves to reveal a sparsely-furnished room with polished floors made of reconstituted pinewood. Instead of the narrow bed and rough cotton blanket, they’re lying in a roomy four-poster, made over with crisp sheets and more pillows than anyone could possibly need.

Elio reaches to kiss Oliver on the mouth. There’s the taste of tortelli cremaschi, and peaches, and the something Oliver might remember if he searches hard enough.

“...I have to go,” Elio says. 

“You could stay.” Oliver shifts his grasp on Elio and turns to look into his face. There are lines in Elio’s face, now, silver at his temples, and every inch of him is still as heartbreaking as it was that night in old Rome when they had kissed and touched and not realized that it was the last time they would ever make love. 

Elio says, gently, “You’re at least two decades too late. Besides, that’s not how this works.”

Oliver doesn’t want to think about how it works. Little sentences surface from how it used to work, before: _This will only work if we work together._ And, _Tell me things, details. Any small crumb of something specific. I can incorporate it into my memory banks._ A flickering thing, made of light and memory and machine learning, which couldn’t touch and be touched.

Not at all like this. _What would I have called you, then?_ he’d had to ask, before. This Elio knows.

Oliver makes himself smile, wanly. “There it is again, you not wanting to accept my help.”

Elio’s eyes are dark. The real deal, right here: learning that comes not from algorithms but from years of pain and pleasure, a world away from Oliver. Maybe he’s considering it — considering staying with Oliver and never waking up again. But even Oliver, with his own faded hair and fading senses, knows that’s a path to unending madness, and not just for Oliver. 

“I’m not sure if you believe me, but I’ll be back,” Elio says. He slips out of the bed, and when Oliver opens his eyes again, Elio is dressed. Right down to the faux-lawyer’s blazer, the cufflinks, the autumnal distance in his gaze.

“Of course I believe you,” Oliver says. He has always believed in Elio, always trusted Elio, but he’s not sure Elio has ever truly trusted him.

*

It’s always a surprise, coming back to his body, guided by the staccato rhythm of the heart monitor, like a rope of searchlights strung out across an unlit trail to guide him through the darkness to his new home.

Elio disengages from the machine, lifting the helmet from his head and setting it aside. As always, his legs feel numb, as if someone shot a bullet into his spine and took away his ability to walk and to love again. He finds the sensation never lasts, though. He just has to be patient; G-d knows he’s had a lot of practice.

The door to the bedroom opens, revealing his host. George resembles his father, though he’s not as tall as Oliver still is — Rebecca must not have been a tall woman. When Elio first set eyes on him under the impersonal fluorescent lights of the airport, he felt his knees shake, as if the earth had suddenly opened up under his feet; as it had done that day when Oliver had first stepped out of that cab into the tree-lined driveway in Italy — blindingly golden hair, billowing blue shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, sunglasses, tanned skin everywhere — stirring cataclysms in Elio’s then-virgin flesh, like a force of nature that razed empires and kingdoms to the ground and remade civilization anew.

George is followed by a young nurse, who is holding a clean bedpan.

“Magenta always changes Oliver around this time,” George explains, diffidently. “Doubt even you’d want to stay for that, Professor.”

“I don’t think he’d want me to, either,” Elio says. 

They both turn towards the bed. The man who lies there is amazingly handsome still, hair as thick and wavy as it had been twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, now burnished to the colour of a silver coin. Lean, no excess fat, as if he still jogged every morning, as if he hadn’t been confined to this room and hooked up to its machines for months. Alexander might have looked like this as he lay on the altar in his inner sanctum in Babylon, preserved for six long days from decay by the demands of the empire he’d built and the tears of the soldiers who loved him and had not been willing to let him go.

Flawless, almost entirely proof against the withering of age, save for a few sunspots on his hands. The small imperfections have always broken Elio’s heart; even now, he wants to kiss each and every one away. 

He settles for lacing Oliver’s fingers in his. _Manibus conjunctis:_ hand in hand. And while he’s at it, for good measure: _dominus dominorum, canticus canticorum, sanctus sanctorum_ — Lord of lords, Song of Songs, holy of holies. 

Heart of my heart.

“You’re the only person I wanted to say goodbye to before I died. Because only then would this life make any sense.” 

George takes a slow step closer. His blue eyes are filled with complex pity. Belatedly, Elio realizes he has spoken out loud. 

“You’re not dead yet. And, you know, neither is he.”

There are many things Elio can say to this, born out of a lifetime of bitterness and lost chances. They have missed out on so much; he could easily have missed out on this. And yet, by some quirk of fate or circumstance, he’s here now — at Oliver’s sickbed, in this beach house belonging to Oliver’s son, with a machine which Oliver once used to reach out to his past.

Elio isn’t sure the use he’s made of the Xavier-Eisenhardt machine is strictly authorized, but what else would the Institute expect its state-of-the-art technology to be used for, if not to connect with loved ones unreachable by more conventional methods? 

Eventually: “I said to him, a long time ago, that I didn’t regret anything. That this was given once only.”

And yet, in the winter of their lives, it seems this is no longer true. The world has spun on, and taken them with it, and somehow given them the unexpected gift of more time. 

He clasps Oliver’s hand more firmly. It may just be wishful thinking, but perhaps Oliver hears him in his dreams, and clasps back.

**Author's Note:**

> Asuralucier, your stories were so mesmerising I couldn’t remix just one ;) Like this remix, its title is a mash-up of the titles of both originals. Beta by Miss M and Kainosite.
> 
> Margaret is for [Margaret of Navarre](https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/navarre/heptameron/heptameron.html#N9), Jordan is for the playwright of [Marjorie Prime](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Harrison); Max Eisenhardt is one of the [many aliases](https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Max_Eisenhardt_\(Earth-616\)) of Marvel 616’s Erik Lehnsherr.


End file.
